Daniels vs. Daniels

Why people are curious about the Indiana governor's marriage.

By

James Taranto

Updated May 17, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

This column hopes that Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana, decides to run for president. He is a serious public servant with a strong reformist record, and was one of the few Republicans with competitive constituencies to withstand the Democratic tide of 2006 and 2008. In the latter year, he was re-elected with 58% of the vote even as Barack Obama carried his state, the first Democrat to do so since Lyndon B. Johnson.

Another Republican survivor was Tim Pawlenty, who won a second term as Minnesota's governor in the GOP's annus horribilis of 2006. Of the Republicans who have so far set up presidential exploratory committees, Pawlenty is the only one whose candidacy is not, for one reason or another, preposterous to contemplate. Daniels would provide a real alternative to "Pawlenty by default."

There's been a lot of talk recently about Daniels's marriage to First Lady Cheri Daniels--or rather, about his marriages to her. The Washington Post explains:

The couple has a complicated personal history. They divorced in 1994, and Cheri Daniels moved to California, where she remarried. The future governor, then a senior executive at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, raised the couple's four daughters, who at the time spanned the ages of 8 to 14. Cheri Daniels later returned, and the couple remarried in 1997.

The Post spends a long but inconclusive paragraph trying to explain why this would matter, noting that "officials at potential rival campaigns to Daniels disagreed about whether the personal history of Cheri Daniels would ever be a vulnerability or even germane to the race."

ENLARGE

The Danielses last week.
Associated Press

There has been no suggestion that Mr. Daniels behaved wrongfully in private, much less in public. Mrs. Daniels's actions back then are reminiscent of Meryl Streep's character Joanna Kramer, the villain in "Kramer vs. Kramer." But since the Indiana first lady is a private citizen who appears to have no political ambitions of her own, her past indiscretions are none of anyone's business.

Yet there's a curiosity around this story, which we suppose comes down to the question: What does it tell us about the character of a prospective president? Or, to put it more pointedly: If a man would take back a woman after such a betrayal, is he tough enough to lead the country?

On the information available, that question is unanswerable, and the compression of the narrative is probably deceiving. The story jumps ahead three years, from betrayal to reconciliation, but the only clue about the middle of the story is a quote noted by the New York Times:

[Mr. Daniels] has discussed [the marital drama] only once publicly, telling The Indianapolis Star in 2004: "If you like happy endings, you'll love our story. Love and the love of children overcame any problems."

"The love of children" certainly speaks well of the governor's maturity and leadership. Perhaps that will prove sufficient to assuage whatever doubts voters have about the story. The Times adds that "it is a topic that Mr. Daniels does not relish delving into," and we must admit the past few years have made a reluctance to talk about oneself into a very attractive quality in a president.

Meanwhile, Gov. Daniels does seem to display a reserved sort of toughness in his political life. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month noted that he overcame strong resistance to win passage of a far-reaching education reform law: "Answering to the unions, Democrats tried the flee-to-Illinois strategy to block the reform but Mr. Daniels treated them with gentle scorn and waited them out."

And after calling for a "truce" on social issues, Daniels signed a bill banning state funding to Planned Parenthood. The Times's Gail Collins quoted abortion advocate Nancy Keenan: "He called a truce on social issues, and he was the first to fold." Keenan had evidently construed "truce" to mean "surrender" (or "switching sides"), a mistake that more than a few social conservatives made as well. Conservatives who like happy endings could do worse than to give Daniels a second look.

Oh, l'Humanité! "She wanted it, his lawyer asserted in court yesterday," the New York Post reports, describing the "explosive defense" a lawyer is offering on behalf of France's most prominent rape defendant:

"The evidence, we believe, will not be consistent with a forcible encounter," said Ben Brafman, the high-powered lawyer of [International Monetary Fund] chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, at the suspect's sensational arraignment in a packed criminal courtroom. . . .

As the haughty-looking Frenchman [who by the way did not serve in Vietnam] awaited his arraignment yesterday morning, he sat on a bench with an accused unlicensed driver and two low-level drug dealers.

After his hearing, he was strip-searched like any other common criminal, and forced to undergo a complete body-cavity search.

Another haughty Frenchman, Bernard Henri-Levy, finds this all very galling. BHL, whose bio describes him as being involved in "an ongoing battle against the inhumane," defends DSK (French big-shots often go by three initials, as if they were 20th-century Democratic presidents or al Qaeda terrorists) in the pages of the Daily Beast. Particularly inhumane in BHL's view is that this elite criminal defendant is being treated like a common one:

This morning, I hold it against the American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other.

CNN.com, reporting from Paris, quotes Jack Lang, a member of France's Parliament and a member of DSK's Socialist Party:

Lang called the American justice system "inhumane." "For 48 hours now, only the side of the accusation has been heard . . . and the versions given by police have been contradictory," he said. "The refusal to allow him out on bail, when no violent crime has been committed--even in America suspects are usually let go on bail if a violent crime has not been committed."

Note that Lang is not merely saying that DSK is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He flatly claims that no violent crime has been committed. That is to say, his view is that forcible sodomy and attempted forcible rape are not violent acts.

As for the denial of bail, prosecutor Daniel Alonso explains that pretty convincingly to the Post:

"It's just like Roman Polanski--it's the same, exact situation," Alonso warned Jackson, referring to the movie director who was charged with a sex act involving a child in California in 1977 and fled to France to dodge prosecution for more than 30 years.

Polanski actually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge after a 13-year-old girl testified that he had drugged and sodomized her, then fled the U.S. to escape his sentence. He too found a vigorous champion in Bernard-Henri Levy.

BHL closes by cheering DSK for efforts on behalf of the downtrodden:

Europe, not to say the world, that is indebted to him for contributing, for the past four years at the head of the IMF, to avoiding the worst.

On one side, there were the hardline ultraliberals, partisans of rigorous plans, without modulation or nuance, and on the other, those who, Dominique Strauss-Kahn at their head, had begun to implement rules of the game that were less lenient toward the powerful, more favorable to proletarian nations and, among the latter, to the most fragile and vulnerable.

He was arrested just hours before the meeting during which he would face a more orthodox German chancellor to plead the cause of a country, Greece, that he believed could be brought back to order without being brought to its knees. His defeat would also be that of this great cause. It would be a disaster for this entire part of Europe and of the world, because the IMF, under his leadership and for the first time in its history, did not intend to sell out to the superior interests of Finance. And that would really be a dreadful sign.

What's the difference between an orthodox Marxist and a French Socialist? The French guy thinks the state should seize the means of reproduction.

Reliable Sources You've got to give Arnold Schwarzenegger this: Next to those Frenchmen, he looks like a Methodist pastor. The Los Angeles Times reports on the reason the former California governor separated from wife Maria Shriver:

She learned he had fathered a child more than a decade ago--before his first run for office--with a longtime member of their household staff.

Shriver moved out of the family's Brentwood mansion earlier this year, after Schwarzenegger acknowledged the paternity. The staff member worked for the family for 20 years, retiring in January.

The Times quotes the ex-staffer as saying she "left on good terms with them," though if she'd stayed a day longer, it might not have been on such good terms with Shriver. What amused us about this story, though, was this passage:

Schwarzenegger took financial responsibility for the child from the start and continued to provide support, according to a source who declined to be identified because of the former governor's request for privacy.

Because it would be a terrible invasion of Schwarzenegger's privacy if anyone--well, other than the Times reporter--found out the name of his loose-lipped staffer.

Metaphor Alert "It was a chilly winter for Barack Obama, politically speaking. For six months, he and his party shivered under the avalanche that had buried them in November's midterm election while Republicans disported themselves on the partisan ski slopes, pausing only to throw snowballs, some of them dirty, and warm themselves with nice hot cups of tea. Lately, though, there's been a change in the weather. The barometer began to rise on Wednesday, April 27th. . . . But there's an election next year, and the show must go on. Also last week, another barker elbowed his way into what used to be called, back when the Republican Party was still an ideological three-ring circus, the big tent."--Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker, May 23 issue

Out on a Limb "Donald Trump 2012 Always Looked Like a Publicity Stunt"--headline, U.S. News & World Report, May 17

A lot of pundits are saying I should stand up and say this whole thing is a mistake, admit it and walk away. . . . There's only one problem: it wouldn't be honest. I did what I believed was right for the people of my state.

That prompted this comment by National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru:

I think it's almost always a mistake for candidates to provide political commentary. Romney shouldn't have put himself on the same plane as these pundits, shouldn't have made it explicit that he pays attention to them, shouldn't go meta and talk about the political implications of the performance he's giving as he's giving it. Too many candidates do this kind of thing, and it rarely works to their benefit.

We have to say, we find Ponnuru's argument compelling. It certainly seems to us that Romney has blown it yet again. However, as always we will keep an open mind and reserve judgment until we've heard Romney's response.

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